Wednesday, June 18, 2008

´Metal Gear Solid 4´ misses sales target?

´Metal Gear Solid 4´, still officially a PlayStation3 exclusive, seems to have missed Konami´s sales targets. According to Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu (translated by Joystiq), ´MGS4´ sold 476.334 copies "in its first few days" in Japan.

That figure may make the title "the best-selling PS3 game to date in the region", but the game´s assistant producer Ryan Payton had set a higher mark in a Reuters article late last year:

Payton said the new "Metal Gear Solid" needs to sell over a million copies on the first day it goes on sale due to its costly production, but that may be a tough mark to hit given sluggish PS3 sales.

No definite figures are known for Europe or the US, but judging from the Japanese figures it seems unlikely that Payton´s target was met.

European software sales have been decent according to Chart Track but failed to boost hardware sales.

Why is this so significant? Of course, Konami will use those sales figures as a final decider regarding the exclusivity status of the game, providing the decision has not yet been taken.

Last November, SCEA´s senior vice president of marketing, Peter Dille, talked down the importance of lost exclusives:

From our perspective, as long as the games aren't going exclusive to other platforms, PS3 gamers are not actually losing anything.

That is true, at least for the ten million or so PS3 owners. But what about the masses that have not yet bought a console? To them, MGS4 will not be a reason to buy a PS3. And the Chart Track figures suggest that ´MGS4´ failed as a system seller. So, from an economic point of view, the game seems to have disappointed both Sony and Konami.

EDIT Payton claims he was misquoted. He never mentioned any sales targets, he insists.

38 comments:

Anonymous
said...

hi guys

just took a gander at the clone wars shots and....no.....I'm not terribly impressed as you might have guessed....they look quite shitty actually. which is not surprising given that its a Wii game...Its hardly surprising its no mystery its a wii game afterall. We are used to crap graphics by now arent we!?!;)

no Seriously, to me it seems like many Wii game are more of a step back from what was achieved last gen with titles like Resi 4 and Metroid Prime 1 if at least the art style was good to begin with.

Which leads me to: Conduit

Conduit still looks like utter crap even with the new wave of shots ...makes you wonder what encourages them to release so many of them ....to keep on shittingshitty visuals in your face I presume..

The Metal Gear Solid games generally sell between 5-6 million copies, which is big, but not compared to Grand Theft Auto. I think Konami may have been over estimating the sales potential of this game, given the PS3's relatively small install base. I think Konami will end up porting it to the 360.

Wait a second! I thought Killzone 2 is the reason why people bought a PlayStation 3! That 2005 E3 trailer is still grained into the heads of gamers, and many expect it to change the world even though the previews and footages looks like it won't do much.

Let me say this, for those of you who honestly think this game could be ported to 360, you are sorely mistaken,y it's way beyond 360s capabilities in both graphics, disc size, and overall features, if you think 360 can pull this off, you need to seriously play Metal Gear Solid 4, because it really is that good... and yes I've played Gears of War, Call of Duty 4, and Grand Theft Auto, and this game really does set the bar that much higher

i'm no Sony Fanboy, I'm a Nintendo Fanboy, I just happen to own a PS3, if you have a problem with that, your naivety is very funny, i'm sure you've played MGS4 and know... it would take a minimum of 5 DVDs to put onto 360... sorry, not happening, as much as 360 fanboys would like to think, it's just funny when ppl talk outta their mouth without being on both sides of the fence

Thanks for your contribution. But allow me to ask: how many GB does the game install onto the PS3...? See, space is no longer a problem (at least not with PS3 and Xbox360). I have no doubt that MGS4 could run on the 360. The necessary disk space might simply be a bit larger.

Hi Some Guy.

Thank you ever so much for the link. I was not aware of the story and will correct my article as soon as possible.

As far as ´Alone in the Dark´ is concerned, I played the Wii version for an hour or so at the weekend and I can only agree with some of the reviews. It is a game you really want to love, but it is extremely tedious in places. You die far too often and need to re-play scenes again and again and again... I regret to say it since it also has some cool features, but you need not buy the game.

P.S.: Do not expect the Nibris article anytime soon. It took ages to research the Crossbeam article and I expect Nibris will be a similar undertaking. However, I have come across some very interesting facts already, So please stay tuned.

No disrespect here at all, I am just wondering how in the world you can compress 50 gb of information... If you read through the documentation from Kojima himself he said the reason for the installs, not just the one at the beginning, but in between acts is because the 50 gb was simply not enough, some of it had to be compressed, the first install is 4 gb, and then that install is installed over once the next install takes place, a majority of 360 owners only have the 20 gb hdd, minus the amount of info on that operating system, and the fact that not all 360s came with the hdd, I'm still wondering how this is going to work? I'm not trying to be difficult, I've played every major title for all 3 systems and I am a Nintendo Fanboy, but I can appreciate the amount of work that was put into this game by Kojima, and have much respect for the quality that has been produced here, thanks for your response Falafelkid

jordan: Kojima can say all that he wants. :) Remember that, when MGS3 came out, he said he was maxing out the DVD's overall space. Not two weeks later, 4chan poked around the disc and found that every audio file was essentially raw, uncompressed data.

I'm assuming it's the same case here. That, or the result of piss-poor data management. A game shouldn't NEED to have 6 installs. Please don't give me the "oh, it's only a couple of minutes" argument, here. That's a few more minutes I could be using to play the damn game.

On top of that, the game STILL has decently long load times between areas. Cripes, stuff like this is why I got AWAY from PC gaming.

m. ferreira, have you actually played the game? compared to 360 load times, they're REALLY good for the amount of detail, even if it's uncompressed, can you still tell me that all that compression is going to make up for 50 gigs of data? You're telling me they could literally take a roughly 9 gig DVD and compress 50 gigs worth of data onto a single disc? And you don't think there's going to be quality loss? I don't even think Microsoft would like to have that happen because it essentially cedes to the public who has the superior system, not to mention Kojima even poking fun of the fact that on any other system you would have to switch discs... Have you honestly played the game all the way through?

M. Ferriera? he said 6 installs in between Acts, that's not even accurate? And load times are better than most nething on 360, anyone could read something and find these things out, that doesn't prove ANYTHING

Actually you can greatly decrease the amount of space of MGS IV's data if the native resolution of the game was 720p and not 1080p. Plus if you throw in some compression for both video and audio you can probably squeeze the whole game into 2 dual layered dvds.

50 gigs for a game. I call BS. I'm been modelling for a while and thats the stupidiest thing ever. Most 3d models are around 2-4 megs raw and the models for the normal maps are only 200-300 megs with 8 million poygons you usually need around 4 gigs of ram to open them. The PS3 doesn't have any thing close to that. Go and open up photoshop and tell me how big a 512x512 texture is meg wise? Then tell me what that equals after making one for the face upper body and lower body. Thats 3 textures min what is the total megs wise. About how many different types of enemies would you say is in the game? Be sure to keep count ok! You may not have access to any game stage art but most FPS ship with at least 20-30 maps that all fits on a dvd. The simple fact that a level can only stream 256megs of texture if nothing else was running defeats the purpose of having such a large disk.

Sure the game is good but really have you seen the detail in gears of war compared to MGS4? Even Drake's fortune has more detail.

Then on top of that a game that was way bigger than MGS4 came out called GTA4 and it fit just fine on the xbox's format. So what came extra on the PS3 disk?

The whole 3d gaming needing this disk is just silly. Either way you will have to do installs so use one disk or a few doesn't change much unless your publisher tries to sh!t you by charging for extra disk thus eating away at your pay check for the game.

Whole movies fit on dvds also using old a$$ mpeg 2 decoding when we have mpeg 4 and better. No one complained about sound then? The Blue ray is very unnessiary yet just like the PS2 the fanboys keep spreading the hype instead of researching and learning about how this stuff is made.

For a game that can be beat in around 6 hours it better be dragging you thur a lot of different places at break neck speeds to fill up 50 gigs worth of 3d models, texturing, code, yet sound could fill that up with a few minutes depending on the bit rate. A movie that is raw could fill terabyte easy.

Seriously I would clap for the blue ray if it did not take us backwards in reguards of disk speed. I mean it's like we are using tape drives from old back up systems to run game on now. The size of this disk was not matched well with the speed of the read or write specs. It is more of a DRM device than a need yeah maybe thats the point.

What is funny is a blu-ray movie can still be compressed and played on a burnt DVD.

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